After an injury, the harm you experience isn’t limited to medical expenses or lost income. Pain, stress, and changes to your daily life can take an equally heavy toll. If someone else’s negligence caused you harm, you may seek non-economic damages to compensate for these losses through a personal injury claim.
At Brown & Crouppen Law Firm, we help injured people throughout Missouri pursue fair compensation for the full impact of their injury on their lives. Our attorneys can help you understand what non-economic damages are available and how they might affect your case.
How Non-Economic Damages Can Shape Your Personal Injury Claim
Non-economic damages recognize how an injury affects your life beyond financial losses. They acknowledge the physical pain, emotional strain, and quality of life changes that follow an accident.
These losses are often the most challenging parts of recovery. Including them in your claim strengthens your case by showing the full extent of what you’ve endured. Their value can significantly increase your total compensation.
Because they capture the true severity of suffering the defendant’s actions have caused, fighting for non-economic damages also promotes accountability. It shows that negligent conduct has real, human consequences, which may deter similar behavior in the future.
Common Types of Non-Economic Damages
Our attorneys can help you pursue compensation for any of the ways your injuries have affected your well-being outside of finances. Common types of non-economic damages often available in personal injury cases include:
- Pain and suffering: This accounts for the physical pain you’ve suffered due to your injuries. It may include acute pain from the initial injury and any chronic pain you experience after your condition has stabilized.
- Emotional distress: You may pursue compensation for the anxiety, fear, depression, or grief that develops because of what you’ve been through. These symptoms may be responses to the trauma of the incident or the ongoing challenges you’ve faced during your recovery.
- Loss of enjoyment of life: Your injuries may prevent you from participating in hobbies or daily activities the way you used to. In that case, you may seek compensation for the loss of joy or fulfillment of those activities once brought to your life.
- Disfigurement and scarring: Visible injuries can change how you feel about yourself and how others see you. These damages recognize how those changes affect your daily life.
- Loss of consortium: Serious injuries can limit your ability to offer companionship or affection to your spouse. Compensation may be available for this relational impact.
How To Calculate Non-Economic Damages
Unlike other types of compensatory damages, non-economic damages don’t come with bills or receipts—instead, they’re subjective and require a close look at the injury’s personal impacts. There’s no easy way to assign a dollar value to these losses, so courts and insurers use two common approaches to determine how much money to award for them: the multiplier method and the per diem method.
Multiplier Method
One potential approach is the multiplier method. It begins by totaling your economic damages, including medical expenses and lost income. That total is then multiplied by a number, often between 1.5 and 5.
The multiplier number will depend on the severity of your injuries and non-economic losses. More severe or permanent injuries may warrant a higher multiplier, while minor injuries may yield a lower one.
Per Diem Method
The per diem method assigns a daily dollar amount to your non-economic losses. That daily rate is then multiplied by the number of days your symptoms are expected to last.
The value chosen for each day depends on the severity of your injuries and the extent to which they disrupt your routine. The goal is to translate the injury’s personal impact into a figure that reflects the level of suffering you’ve experienced.
Missouri’s Limits on Non-Economic Damages
Missouri caps non-economic damages only in medical malpractice cases. These limits apply when a health care provider’s negligence causes harm to a patient.
A standard cap of $400,000 applies to most medical malpractice injuries. A higher cap of $700,000 applies to cases involving catastrophic harm. These are the starting values set in Missouri Revised Statutes § 538.210, and the caps increase by 1.7% each year.
While injured people have challenged this law’s constitutionality many times, state courts have continued to uphold it. While it often results in less compensation for medical malpractice victims than they’d otherwise be entitled to, significant damages may still be available.
Other types of personal injury cases, such as car accidents or slip and fall claims, do not have damage caps. That means the court may award the full amount of non-economic damages it believes is appropriate for your case.
If you're sustaining injury as a result of someone else's fault, there are different types of compensation you're entitled to. One is economic damages, by economic damages, we're talking about you're entitled to get back your medical bills. You're entitled to get back your lost wages. You're entitled to have your vehicle repaired. There are also non-economic damages. You'll hear it referred to as pain and suffering. It's the amount of damages you sustain because you are going to have to live the rest of your life with pain. And we will get both economic damages for you. But more importantly, we're going to get the non-economic damages, the damages for your loss. That's the type of compensation we get for our clients
How Brown & Crouppen Can Support Your Claim for Non-Economic Damages
Insurance companies often dispute or undervalue non-economic damages in personal injury cases because they’re subjective. Our team is here to fight back against these tactics and pursue the compensation you deserve.
Our award-winning attorneys can assess the full scope of your losses and collect evidence demonstrating how the injury has impacted your life. This may involve gathering personal statements from you and your loved ones and collecting therapy and medical records. We may also consult with experts who can provide insight into your injuries’ long-term effects.
From there, we’ll present your case to the insurer or court and tell your story in a way that truly captures the depth of what you’ve endured. We’ll also work to prove liability to connect your suffering to the at-fault party’s negligence.
You’ve been through enough—now it’s time to focus on your recovery. When you turn to us for help, we’ll handle all the legal details so you can rebuild your life with peace of mind. Contact us online or call 800-536-4357 to start moving forward with a free consultation, where we’ll explain what your non-economic damages may be and how they might affect your case.
